Lost Kingdoms Of Africa

The Kingdom of Asante once reigned supreme in West Africa. It was a kingdom that became an empire. It played a pivotal role in commerce that linked three continents and it was built on slaves and gold.

On the 22nd of January 1879 the British Army suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in its history. In just over three hours over twelve hundred British troops armed with state-of-the-art weapons were annihilated by an African army equipped only with spears and shields.

It's easy to think of Islamic North Africa as Arab rather than African. But the land that is now Morocco once lay at the center of the vast African Kingdom that stretched from northern Spain to the heart of West Africa.

For centuries the interior of East Africa was unknown to the outside world. That changed in the 1860s thanks to a geographical puzzle that had obsessed Europeans for decades.